Here's a number most tradies know in their gut but have never measured: the quote you send tonight competes with two or three others landing in the same inbox. They all look the same — a PDF, a list of line items, a total at the bottom. The customer can't tell the $8,000 quote from the $11,000 one except by the number, so the number is all they compare. Then they sit on it.
We run an electrical and smart-home business in Sydney. We got tired of that game, so we built our own quoting software — and after using it on our own jobs for long enough to see the difference, we've released it for every trade. It's called robot® Quote, and it's part of robot® Plan, our floor-plan markup tool.
The problem with the tools trades use today.
Most sparkies, plumbers and chippies quote out of one of two tools: Invoice2Go or Xero. Both are good at what they were actually built for — invoicing and accounting. Quoting is the bolt-on.
A Xero quote is a clean, static document: line items, quantities, a total, an accept button. An Invoice2Go quote is much the same with your logo on top. Neither is interactive. The customer can't explore anything, can't adjust anything, can't see what the job actually looks like. There are no optional extras they can tick on or off. There's no discount engine beyond typing a lower number. It's a piece of paper on a screen — and it reads like one.
That's not a knock on Xero. We push our invoices into Xero automatically and wouldn't change it. It's brilliant accounting software. It's just not a sales tool — and a quote is a sales document, the single most important one your business sends.
What the big service companies figured out years ago.
Large home-services companies — the ones running fleets of vans — quote differently. Their techs present options on a tablet: good, better, best. Add-ons with photos. A discount that's framed as a promotion, not an apology. Their conversion rates and average job values reflect it, and none of it is an accident — it's pricing psychology applied to trade work.
The software they use to do it costs a fortune and takes weeks of setup and training. So the tools stayed with the big end of town, and everyone else kept sending PDFs.
robot® Quote brings that playbook down to a one-person operation, without the enterprise software pain.
What an interactive quote changes.
Optional items your customer controls. Mark any line as optional — the outdoor sensor light, the extra powerpoints in the garage, the ceiling-fan upgrade. The customer unticks what they don't want and the total updates live in front of them. They feel in control, and you're no longer guessing which extras to include. You include all of them, and let the customer say yes.
Discounts done properly. This is the part trade software has ignored almost completely. In robot® Quote a discount pops with a message you write — "booked this month", "returning customer", whatever fits the job — and the totals count up in front of them. It reads like a promotion from a serious company, not a hand-written number crossed out on a piece of paper.
Line items with photos. Every line can carry an image of the actual product, with labour and materials colour-coded. A customer who can see the chandelier fitting or the switchboard asks fewer questions and decides faster.
Signed on their phone. The quote goes out by SMS or email as a live link, not an attachment. They accept with an e-signature and you're notified the second they do. Then the draft invoice lands in your Xero — one per payment stage — and the job appears in ServiceM8. No re-typing anything, ever.
What happened when we used it on our own jobs.
We didn't build this on a hunch — we ran it in our own business first. Two things moved, and they moved noticeably.
Upsells went up. Optional items turned out to be the single biggest change. When every quote carries a handful of pre-priced extras the customer can tick on, some of them get ticked. Nobody has to make an awkward phone call pitching add-ons — the quote does the selling.
Quotes converted faster. The gap between "quote sent" and "quote accepted" shrank. An interactive quote with a time-framed promotion gives the customer a reason to decide now, and an e-signature on their phone means deciding takes thirty seconds instead of a printed-and-scanned form.
Side-by-side.
The floor-plan part.
robot® Quote is one half of robot® Plan. The other half is the markup tool: upload any floor plan and tap where the downlights, switches, powerpoints and cameras go — real products, dragged straight onto the plan, no CAD. Every item is counted as you place it, so on the Pro Plus tier the plan literally writes the quote. No counting symbols off a drawing, no missed items, no quote that dies because you forgot a circuit.
Your customer gets a live link too — they can pan around their own home and tap any device to see what it is, with your quote sitting right next to it. It's the difference between "here's a number" and "here's your house."
What it costs.
The markup tool is free — one plan, full design toolkit, PDF export, live share link. robot® Quote starts at $29/month for your first three months (then $49), with a 30-day free trial. Pro Plus — where the plan auto-writes the quote — is $39/month for the first three months, then $69. There's a Team tier for crews. Prices in AUD including GST, cancel anytime, and your plans stay saved if you do.
If you quote jobs for a living, try it on your next real one: quote.robotsmarthomes.com.au/design. Mark up the plan at the kitchen bench during the walkthrough, and the quote's ready before you're back in the ute.
Built in Sydney by robot® Smart Homes — we use it every day on our own jobs.